Ultra ends up damaging your audio more than anything else in the dither/ns conversion process.
30dB of DR lost on 16+kHz for 13dB increase on 2-14k region. 66dB of high frequency noise is easily audible, by most youngsters and adults with normal aldosterone levels.

 

I've gone by that standard, too (using the "divisible by 2" way of thinking: 88.2 kHz=44.1 kHz/32-bit=16-bit), only recently upgraded to doing everything at 96 kHz because of HD audio and uncompressed Blu-ray. I actually wouldn't mind trying a mix at 176.4 kHz.

 

Bit depth is already based in powers of 2, regardless of the appearance of 32 being twice of 16. It's that decimal versus binary illusion.

In other words, 16-bit holds twice as many values as 15-bit. That's not obvious to the average citizen or even average consumer of technology but still mathematical truth.

 

Last edited: May 7, 2016

I skimmed the first page, and didn't see this mentioned... didn't read the other pages at all. But wanted to mention, if some of yo u didn't know already:

The higher the bit depth, i.e - 96k, 192k, the harder the hard drive works, writing in more detail. This causes more stress on the hard drive. Why is this important? Because it's the lifespan of your hard drive. a hard drive writing and reading information at 48k is about HALF the read and write work of 96k, and even more for 192k.

Well, it's a hard drives job, to read and write, and work, right? Yes, it is. But this is where RAID and striping can come into play for speed (only in striping mode, of course), but most importantly - for redundancy. Writing and reading at higher bit depths, and having your hard drives work harder, will shorten their life span - meaning that hard drive you're writing at a higher bit depth, will FAIL much faster than a hard drive writing at half that bit depth.

So, keep that in mind. If you're someone who likes to read/write at 96k or 192k, i hope you're using a RAID setup and preferably striping, because you will kill that hard drive much faster than writing at a lower bit depth.

Happy computing

 

Take this from a professional who makes mathematically intensive music applications, rather than opinions:

https://www.meldaproduction.com/text-tutorials/analog-vs-digital

Google is still your friend.

 

You gave the BEST analogy, frequency only matters when processing is needs to be applied to raw sound, but when the audio has been processed, it can be down sampled to 44KHz for most listeners.

 

The most important factor in digital audio quality today is hardware interface. Most cheap hardware out there use cheap pre-amp technology which equally amplifies noise and audio. Other important factors are less digital jitter and latency. Best investment is in more expensive hardware interfaces like Universal Audio, RME, MOTU, Avid.

 

Yeah man, why bother counting the fact any physical part adds thermal instability, a ton of noise, and has far narrower frequency spectrum it can operate in. Take any mic. You get 50Hz - 15kHz maybe? Why bother with "infinite sample rate" if you don't have anything there. Just a waste of disk space.

 

Another piece of bullshit. "equally amplifies noise and audio". Noise and audio are one thing. The signal that goes into your interface IS noise + audio. There's no magic button to separate the two. What differs among preamps is the amount of extra noise they add while turning that signal up. Concerning jitter - there isn't a single audio interface currently as far as I know that has dropouts and digital pops while operating at reasonable latency. Yes, with the super pricey interfaces you can keep your latency at 32 samples and forget it exists. Having to pay 4x the price for simple 2 inputs without even a mic pre (I'm looking at you, Apogee)? Thanks, I'll just adjust my buffer once in a while and grab a 4-channel interface for cheaper than this thing.

 

Also, just another 50 cents from me on the above. "The most important factor in digital audio quality today is hardware interface". It's never been so obviously a lie. These days you have AWESOME hardware interfaces. 10 years ago the top engineers in the world would kill for such great sounding, clean preamps - they couldn't get that quality for thousands of dollars and had to deal with it. Now you just grab a box for $100 and you've got the clean signal they dreamed of. The only problem is... that ain't no good when you're recording shitty $10 mics, a guitar that you didn't bother to tune, in a room full of flutter echo, mixing on earbuds, compressing the living shit out of what you do. Let the hardware be great, we've all already met enough people who got discouraged and stopped making music because they "need outboard gear to sound pro", or "get an interface from UAD or they'll have crappy preamps". Really. Stop it. The "bad quality" you hear everywhere comes from the fact people got 100% clean stuff. And the problem is we hear 100% clearly that they suck. It's not a problem with your audio interface.